State you’re planning that next camping trip and you need to know whether you’re going to be able to incessantly check your work email each 10 minutes — do you trust a carrier’s coverage map of unknown age, origin, and honesty, or real-world experience? If French firm Sensorly has its way, you’ll soon be able to answer the latter thanks to the deployment of an app for your phone that continuously measures cellular and WiFi signal strength at your location and silently reports it back to the company’s servers where it’s compiled into color-coded maps predicting your capability to connect. The concept’s very similar to that being undertaken by another up-and-comer that’s been getting a good deal of coverage lately, Root Wireless, but the key difference is that Root’s system is still in private beta — Sensorly’s mobile app is available right now to anyone who’d like to download it and participate (albeit only for Android; iPhone and WinMo are in the pipe). It seems unlikely that they’ve got critical mass to provide meaningful feedback in most areas at this point, but if marginal boost in battery drain is tolerable for you, it might be worth giving it a whirl.

Sensorly aims to keep coverage maps honest originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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